Throughout this cycle I have been working with the Ubuntu Doc team in my capacity as a Community Council member to assist in building up the number of team administrators and work to improve the Getting Started documentation to get new contributors involved with the documentation that ships with Ubuntu. I’m happy to say that the actual amount of work I did was personally pretty minimal; administrators Doug Smythies, Kevin Godby, Benjamin Kerensa really worked hard this cycle to get things into shape, and there is a significant amount of activity on the mailing list today from other contributors.

Now that some of the major hurdles have been tackled, the team is slowly reaching out beyond the immediate community to get more contributors — that’s where you come in!

Does this guide make sense? Does it give you the introductory tools and information you need to start working on documentation? What is missing? Let us know on the Ubuntu Doc mailing list (if possible, sign up for the mailing list so your mail doesn’t get moderated, we want to make it easier on our new list admins!).

Not ready to dive into full documentation writing with Mallard? We also need folks to simply review the documentation. You have a couple options for reviewing the current documentation:

At the command line, type: bzr branch lp:ubuntu/ubuntu-docs (this took 10 minutes for me, be prepared to wait!)

Change to the new ubuntu-docs html directory: cd ubuntu-docs/html/

To build the HTML documentation, just type: make

View the resulting HTML documentation in the html/build/en/ directory. You can open file:///path/to/ubuntu-docs/html/build/en/index.html in your browser (where “/path/to/” is where you put the docs, like /home/elizabeth/)

Tip: When reviewing documentation built on your system keep an eye on the address bar to make sure the pages you are reviewing are still your local file:/// ones, there are some links in the documentation that take you to other sites

Reviewing instructions

To prevent everyone from reviewing the same few pages over and over again, we’ve created a spreadsheet to track which pages still need to be reviewed. Visit the spreadsheet and find a page that hasn’t been reviewed yet and add your name to the Reviewer column. It looks quite empty now, but don’t be shy :) If all the pages have been reviewed once, feel free to pick a page and review it a second time!

If you have any questions or run into any problems, please feel free to email the Ubuntu Doc mailing list at ubuntu-doc@lists.ubuntu.com or chat with us in the #ubuntu-doc IRC channel on irc.freenode.net.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 1st, 2013 at 2:51 pm and is filed under ubuntu planet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.